mcclary s. self-fashioning in the italian madrigal

Modal Subjectivities
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution
to this book provided by the Sonia H. Evers Renaissance Studies
Fund of the University of California Press Associates.
Modal Subjectivities
self-fashioning in the italian madrigal
Susan McClary
university of california press
berkeley los angeles london
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2004 by the Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McClary, Susan.
Modal subjectivities : self-fashioning in the Italian
madrigal / Susan McClary.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-23493-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Madrigals, Italian—Italy—16th century—Analysis,
appreciation. 2. Musical form—History—16th
century. 3. Music theory—History—16th century.
4. Music and language. I. Title.
ML2633.2.M33 2004
782.4'3'0945— dc22 2003025287
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Printed on Ecobook 50 containing a minimum 50% post-
consumer waste, processed chlorine free. The balance
contains virgin pulp, including 25% Forest Stewardship
Council Certified for no old growth tree cutting, pro-
cessed either TCF or ECF. The sheet is acid-free and
meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO
Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).8
contents
list of examples vii
acknowledgments ix
1 / Introduction: The Cultural Work of the Madrigal 1
2 / Night and Deceit: Verdelot’s Machiavelli 38
3 / The Desiring Subject, or Subject to Desire: Arcadelt 57
4 / Radical Inwardness: Willaert’s Musica nova 78
5 / The Prisonhouse of Mode: Cipriano de Rore 101
6 / A Coney Island of the Madrigal: Wert and Marenzio 122
7 / The Luxury of Solipsism: Gesualdo 146
8 / The Mirtillo/Amarilli Controversy: Monteverdi 170
9/I modi 194
appendix: examples 221
index 369

examples
1. Monteverdi, “Ah, dolente partita” 223
2. Verdelot, “Chi non fa prova, Amore” 230
3. Verdelot, “Sì suave è l’inganno” 233
4. Verdelot, “O dolce notte” 236
5. Arcadelt, “Il bianco e dolce cigno” 239
6. Arcadelt, “O felic’ occhi miei” 242
7. Arcadelt, “Ahime, dov’ è ’l bel viso” 245

8. Willaert, “Giunto m’à Amor” (parts 1 and 2) 249
9. Willaert, “I’ vidi in terra” (parts 1 and 2) 258
10. Willaert, “Lasso, ch’ i’ ardo” (parts 1 and 2) 273
11. Rore, “Da le belle contrade d’oriente” 283
12. Rore, “Mia benigna fortuna” (parts 1 and 2) 290
13. Wert, “Solo e pensoso” (parts 1 and 2) 297
14. Marenzio, “Solo e pensoso” (parts 1 and 2) 306
15. Marenzio, “Tirsi morir volea” (parts 1, 2, and 3) 317
16. Wert, “Tirsi morir volea” 326
17. Gesualdo, “Luci serene e chiare” 335
vii
18. Gesualdo, “ ‘Mercè,’ grido piangendo” 341
19. Gesualdo, “Moro, lasso, al mio duolo” 344
20. Monteverdi, “Anima mia, perdona” (parts 1 and 2) 348
21. Monteverdi, “Cruda Amarilli” 358
22. Monteverdi, “O Mirtillo” 363
examplesviii
acknowledgments
It has taken me a very long time to produce this book. My first encounters
with the madrigal repertory occurred in the early 1960s at University High
School in Carbondale, Illinois. Buried deep in a region best known for cul-
tivating corn and soybeans, U School had a student population made up
primarily of faculty brats, and it lavished nearly as much prestige on the
members of Dr. Charles Taylor’s madrigal group as on cheerleaders or sports
stars. I cringe when I remember the fancy costumes we concocted for our-
selves (patterned, I suspect, after the ball gowns in Walt Disney’s Cinderella);
those costumes cured me forever of the desire to dress up in Renaissance
drag. But Charlie taught us to sing virtually all the pieces (English madri-
gals, Parisian chansons, a few Italian numbers) collected in an old Novello
edition with heavily bowdlerized translations. We traipsed around south-

ern Illinois dazzling the crowds—or so we thought at the time—with our
animated renditions of “Sing We and Chant It” and “Matona, Lovely
Maiden.” (Years later, in a crowded café in Harvard Square, Joel Cohen sang
me his own unexpurgated translation of “Matona”—an event I’m not likely
ever to forget.)
In graduate school, I had the privilege of singing in Anthony Newcomb’s
madrigal group, which often worked directly from the hand-scribbled tran-
scriptions later published in his The Madrigal at Ferrara. I owe him my deep-
est gratitude, for it was in the context of his ensemble that I first encoun-
ix
tered many of the pieces discussed in Modal Subjectivities. I also owe to Tony
my abiding intellectual and musical commitment to this repertory. Un-
fortunately, Tony left Harvard before I embarked on my dissertation, “The
Transition from Modal to Tonal Organization in the Works of Monteverdi”
(1976), but his influenced permeates it.
To a very great extent, the present book comprises a reworking of the
first half of my antiquated dissertation (the parts on modal theory and the
Monteverdi madrigals). But it also includes a lengthy backstory concern-
ing the madrigal before Monteverdi. If the dissertation represents a Siegfrieds
Tod stage of the project, Modal Subjectivities subjects you to the whole Ring:
what you need to know in order to make sense of the ending.
I have not been entirely idle in the years since I finished that first draft.
Although I have taught graduate seminars on the madrigal and modal the-
ory at several institutions (the University of Minnesota, McGill University,
and UCLA), most musicologists probably assume that I have moved on
permanently to other pastures: to the standard eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century canon, to feminist theory, to pop music. But in fact, my whole bib-
liography developed as a way of figuring out an implicit scholarly ideology
that resisted my modal analyses when I first tried to get them published in
the 1970s. I had left my heart in the Renaissance, however, and it’s nice to

come home again.
Needless to say, this “revision” diªers considerably from its first version
with respect to theoretical grounding. In the nearly thirty years since I re-
ceived my degree, I have immersed myself in the issues and methods de-
veloped within cultural studies. Whereas the dissertation stuck closely to
treatises and formal analysis, Modal Subjectivities brings the madrigal to the
interdisciplinary project concerned with tracing the histories of bodies, gen-
ders, sexualities, and subjectivities. Whatever its faults, it’s a far richer enter-
prise than it would have been if I had turned it into a book immediately
after graduate school.
And, of course, my writing style has changed. I recall how desperately I
worked to rein in my language in those early years when I thought that
scholarly prose needed to be boring. My turning point occurred in the fall
of 1980, when a rejection slip objected to my use of the word shriek to de-
scribe the high A in Monteverdi’s “Ah, dolente partita.” I decided at that
very moment (with Richard Leppert’s encouragement) that if I could not
write about music in ways that satisfied me, I would not bother to stay in
the field. Well, I persisted. The word shriek appears in all its scandalous glory
in my introductory chapter, and that’s scarcely the beginning.
acknowledgmentsx
I want to thank all those generations of graduate students at my various
institutions for their insights and support (though I suspect that many of
them suªered through the mode class mostly to humor me so they could
get at the trendier aspects of my scholarship). Three students at the Univer-
sity of Minnesota—the late Steven Krantz, Lydia Hamessley, and Donna-
Mae Gustafson—actually wrote dissertations related to modes and/or mad-
rigals. At UCLA, Daniel Goldmark, Kate Bartel, and Gordon Haramaki have
developed their own related projects in the wake of my madrigal seminars,
and Glenn Pillsbury proved an extraordinarily helpful sparring partner in
discussions concerning mode in guitar repertories. Moreover, Glenn and

Gri‹n Woodworth bailed me out whenever I found myself drowning in
the intricacies of Finale. Several of my colleagues at UCLA—particularly
Ray Knapp and Elizabeth Randell Upton—read earlier drafts and oªered
invaluable suggestions.
I am especially indebted to Gordon Haramaki, who worked with me to
produce the cover design. The last thing I wanted was a cover that rein-
scribed the common image of carefree courtiers sitting about singing “fa la
la,” for the repertory I trace rarely touches on frivolity. As I argue in Chap-
ter 2, the madrigal emerges from the troubled cultural context that also in-
cluded Machiavelli and Michelangelo—from a time that understood the
Self as inevitably conflicted. Consequently, Gordon and I chose a Michel-
angelo sculpture that features an exquisitely twisted torso with the head—
the usual locus of speech and identity—left still encased in its block of mar-
ble. The single-voiced monody that supplants the polyphonic madrigal in
the seventeenth century will focus exclusively on the facial dimension of
subjectivity; the madrigal, by contrast, concerns itself with those interior
struggles that reveal themselves in the agonized body of Michelangelo’s slave.
In addition to helping me find the best image, Gordon contributed the
cover’s striking layout and color scheme. Did I mention that he also sings
and dances to Renaissance music in ways that would have passed muster
with Castiglione himself ?
The unexpected boon of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1995
gave me the courage to return to the madrigal project. I might still be crazy
after all these years, but at least now I’m a certified MacArthur Crazy! My
thanks to the foundation for its extraordinarily generous support. I owe more
than I can express to Mary Francis, my editor at the University of Califor-
nia Press. Mary even agreed to print all the madrigals I discuss, after the
model of Glareanus’s monumental Dodecachordon. I composed most of
Modal Subjectivities in a small Catalan town on the Mediterranean, just
acknowledgments xi

south of Barcelona. My dear friends Christopher Small and Neville Braith-
waite first introduced me to Sitges, which turns out to be a paradise for
writing (to say nothing of the rosado, sepia, and pulpitos). Dennis Sanders
generously allowed me to sublet his elegant nineteenth-century apartment
on the Platja de Sant Sebastià during the summers of 2002 and 2003, and
Monica at the Bar Maringa kept me going with her cortados, her willing-
ness to tolerate my fractured Spanish, and her unfailing good spirits.
As always, I owe my greatest debt to Rob Walser, who has stuck with me
throughout all the ups and downs of an unexpectedly tumultuous career.
He alone knows how the issue of mode has driven everything I’ve ever writ-
ten; he even put up with my babbling about mode during rock concerts,
for which I decked myself out (however unconvincingly) as a Metal Babe.
As my department chair, he granted me much-needed time oª from teach-
ing so that I could bring this manuscript to completion. Here’s to Rob, with
love from Miss Mode.
I dedicate this book to the memory of Philip Brett: our mentor, colleague,
and beloved friend, who died far too young and with much of his own bril-
liant work left unfinished. In my chapter on Arcadelt, I discuss a madrigal—
“Ahime, dov’ è ’l bel viso”—that seeks lyrically to conjure up the essence
of a departed loved one. Arcadelt orients his musical setting of this text
around a pitch that resides just beyond the frame of the composition; the
vocal trajectories gesture at closure, but the allegory dictates that they al-
ways fall short of their object of desire. That very quality of incomplete-
ness, however, allows the unresolved energies of “Ahime, dov’ è ’l bel viso”
to linger on into the silence that follows the last measure. Philip may be
gone, but his spirit continues to resonate wherever people sing, study, and
listen to Renaissance music.
acknowledgmentsxii
one
Introduction

The Cultural Work of the Madrigal
Ah, dolente partita!
Ah, fin de la mia vita!
Da te parto e non moro? E pur i’ provo
la pena de la morte
e sento nel partire
un vivace morire,
che dà vita al dolore
per far che moia immortalmente il core.
(Giovanni Battista Guarini,
Il pastor fido)
Ah, sorrowful parting!
Ah, end of my life!
I part from you and do not die? And yet I suªer
the pain of death
and feel in this parting
a vivacious dying,
which gives life to sorrow
causing my heart to die immortally.
In this highly concentrated verse, the pastoral lover Mirtillo attempts to put
into words the contradictory impulses he experiences in but a single moment.
1
Multiple passions—longing, abjection, disbelief, anguish, resignation—
assail him from within, finally to condense into the oxymoron of “un vivace
morire.” Banished from Amarilli’s presence, Mirtillo hangs suspended be-
tween an agony so violent that it ought to bring about his immediate demise
but that, because of its very intensity, prevents the release from suffering prom-
ised by death. In this brief speech, Giovanni Battista Guarini displays his cel-
ebrated epigrammatic style: an economy of means that sketches in a mere
eight lines an emotional state comprising opposites that cannot even hope

for reconciliation. He manifests his virtuosity particularly well in his successive
redefinitions of “vita” and “morte,” binary opposites that shift positions back
and forth until they become hopelessly (and deliciously) fused.
Imagine, however, having the ability to convey all these sentiments at
once, as though one could read the lines of Mirtillo’s speech together ver-
tically as a score. The resulting performance, alas, would amount to little
more than noise, each string of words canceling out the others; instead of
a realistic representation of Mirtillo’s conflicting aªects we would get some-
thing akin to John Cage tuning in randomly to twelve diªerent radio sta-
tions. For despite all its potential for precision and sophistication, language
relies for its intelligibility on the consecutive presentation of ideas in lin-
ear grammatical order. We may marvel at the extent to which Guarini ap-
pears to overcome the limitations of additive speech. Indeed, literary figures
of the twentieth-century literary avant-garde—James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf, for example—labored to push language in these directions through
stream-of-consciousness technique, leading some literary theorists to latch
onto the concept of counterpoint to explain such experiments; Julia Kris-
teva even oªers double-column prose to simulate the experience of jostling
two contrasting thought processes at the same time (a simulation that often
leaves the reader feeling little more than wall-eyed).
1
The very term counterpoint, however, alludes to the cultural medium in
which such feats occur as a matter of course: namely, music. And in his mad-
rigal setting of Mirtillo’s lament, Claudio Monteverdi manages to achieve
the simultaneity toward which Guarini gestures. Given the performing force
of five independent voices, the composer can actually superimpose the sen-
timents of the first four lines of text, allowing them to circulate within the
same space and time. Thus, in the first motive two voices divide from a
introduction2
1. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Co-

lumbia University Press, 1987).
unison to a sequence of close dissonances to enact the searing anguish of
separation expressed in the first line; a too-rapid collapse toward prema-
ture closure on “Ah, fin de la mia vita!” parallels Mirtillo’s futile death wish
in the second; a slowly ascending melodic motive that cancels out the would-
be closure of the death wish registers the incredulity of the third; and an
insistent repetition of a high pitch on “E pur i’ provo / La pena de la morte”
shrieks out the stabbing pain of the fourth (Fig. 1). The dynamic vectors
of Monteverdi’s motives, in other words, oªer analogues to these divergent
aªects, giving us a visceral enactment of the suªering, resignation, doubt,
and protest that surge through Mirtillo’s mind and body during this single
moment. Moreover, in keeping with Guarini’s sense that Mirtillo cannot
escape his internally conflicted state, the madrigal moves on in time to yet
other combinations that recycle these mutually antagonistic elements but
come no closer to resolution.
What Monteverdi oªers here is a sound-image of subjective interiority
on the verge of psychological meltdown, and he thereby gives us what mu-
sic can do that language cannot, even at its most ingenious. Of course, not
everyone has celebrated this particular strategy. Some of Monteverdi’s own
contemporaries, including most prominently Vincenzo Galilei (the father
of the astronomer), complained that the contrapuntal excesses of late
the cultural work of the madrigal 3
figure 1. Monteverdi, “Ah, dolente partita”: First four motives
sixteenth-century madrigals prevented the intelligible projection of the
words; such critics advocated instead a solo-voice model whereby the mu-
sic serves primarily to inflect the lyrics, declaimed in an unimpeded fash-
ion approximating public oratory.
2
To be sure, it takes a leap of faith to accept a five-voice ensemble as re-
producing the swooning of a single individual. Musicologists trip all over

themselves to explain away this embarrassing convention, so far removed
from the realistic expressivity of seventeenth-century solo singing. They gain
support from sixteenth-century critics such as Galilei, who likewise detested
the contrapuntal artifice of polyphonic text-settings. But this convention
should seem quite familiar to fans of gospel, doo-wop, or any of the boy-
group collectives that rise to the top of today’s pop charts with great regu-
larity. Like madrigal ensembles, these feature simulations of complex inte-
riorities: rational grounding in the bass, melodic address in the middle,
ecstatic melismas on the top. No contemporary teenager needs to be told
how the various vocal roles in, say, *NSYNC function together to produce
a viable representation of the Self.
3
Even as Monteverdi was delivering “Ah, dolente partita” to the publisher,
he and his colleagues were embarking on a style that brought music into the
arena of dramatic spectacle we now call opera. The realistic performance of
individual subjects aªorded by the stile recitativo made opera the dominant
genre of musical representation for the next three hundred years. But we often
forget that recitative accomplished its coup at the cost of harnessing music
to the linear imperatives of language: as music attaches itself to the exigen-
cies of rhetorical declamation, it finds itself restricted to speech’s limitations.
We could thus count “Ah, dolente partita” (to which we will return later in
this chapter) as not only Mirtillo’s wistful adieu to Amarilli but also as a re-
luctant farewell to the multivoiced medium honed to perfection in the six-
teenth century as a means for depicting the phenomenological interior Self.
Music historians like to start the clock for the early modern period in 1600.
Several factors lend support to that date: the first opera, the first oratorio,
introduction4
2. Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna (1581); an excerpted trans-
lated appears in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History, rev. ed. (New York: Norton,
1998), 463–67. See my Chapter 6 for a more extended discussion of Galilei.

3. I have not included girl groups in my discussion here because their voice parts interact dif-
ferently. These too find their equivalent, however, in the concerti delle donne in late sixteenth-
century Ferrara and elsewhere. See Chapter 6.
the first solo sonata—in other words, the first “realistic” musical repre-
sentations of the individual persona—all appear in that year. Moreover,
these emergent genres all rely on the new technology of basso continuo re-
sponsible for securing the tonal era that still persists to this day, if not in
expressions of the avant-garde then at least as the lingua franca that un-
derwrites film, advertisement, and popular music. But the coincidence of
all these elements makes it perhaps too easy to draw a line of demarcation
whereby all cultural agendas before that point count as radically Other.
Nor does this problem arise solely within musicology: witness Michel Fou-
cault’s similar partitioning of epistemologies in The Order of Things at
around 1600 or philosophy’s designation of point zero at Descartes’s “Co-
gito.”
4
If we take these interdisciplinary resonances as further confirma-
tion, then the early seventeenth century seems irrefutably the dawn of mod-
ern subjectivity.
Of course, something momentous does occur in European culture around
1600. Yet that break is not so radical that it can justify the flattening out of
what happened prior to that time—an inevitable eªect of Othering. As
Eric Wolf explains in his classic Europe and the People without History, our
historiographies tend to ascribe Selfhood and complex sequences of signifi-
cant events to those we choose to regard as “us,” and they project everyone
else into a kind of timeless, unconscious arcadia.
5
Thus, the decades pre-
ceding our countdown year often count as interesting insofar as their cul-
tural practices point toward the advent of the new; but to the extent that

they align themselves with soon-to-be-obsolete genres and techniques, they
still seem to belong to the old world, the backdrop up against which the
innovations under consideration can stand in bold relief.
Truth to tell, some distinctions of this sort will appear in this book: I
too wish to trace a history of Western subjectivity and will even refer oc-
casionally to the Cogito as a crucial verbal manifestation of the phenom-
enon I examine. I also plead guilty to drawing a line for the sake of de-
the cultural work of the madrigal 5
4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New
York: Vintage Books, 1973). For Foucault-oriented epistemology within musicology, see Gary
Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1993) and Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999).
5. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1997). See also Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropol-
ogy Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
limiting my study, such that what lies before my designated time and out-
side of northern Italy will have to remain suspended (at least for now) in
a vague atemporality.
6
My argument in nuce is that from around 1525 the Italian madrigal serves
as a site—indeed, the first in European history—for the explicit, self-
conscious construction in music of subjectivities. Over the course of a good
century, madrigal composers anticipate Descartes in performing the cru-
cial break with traditional epistemologies, plunging musical style and
thought into an extraordinary crisis of authority, knowledge, power, and
identity. They do so, however, not by repudiating the modal edifice they
had inherited from centuries of scholastic theorizing but rather by system-
atizing, allegorizing, and finally blowing it up from the inside. During the
process, they move not closer to but instead further and further away from

what might qualify as “tonal” (at least in the standard eighteenth-century
sense of the word). And they do so in the service of an agenda that inter-
rogates what it means and feels like to be a Self—to be more specific, a
morbidly introspective and irreconcilably conflicted Self.
If similar issues also show up in various other cultural media, they need
not advance together in lock-step. Indeed, my other work suggests that mu-
sic often yields a somewhat diªerent chronology of issues such as subjective
formations or conceptions of the body than would a study based solely on
written documents. On the one hand, the madrigal resuscitates a tradition
of vernacular love song—together with its infinitely fascinating ruminations
on the aªects of passion on identity—stretching from the Moorish courts
of medieval Spain, through the troubadours, and climaxing in the works of
Petrarch, whose fourteenth-century sonnets prove a major source of texts
for the sixteenth-century genre we are tracing.
7
From that point of view, the
madrigal might count as a throwback, and indeed, one of the important
strands we will follow involves the association of madrigals with individu-
introduction6
6. See, however, Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Kate Bartel is writing a dissertation at UCLA on Josquin
and his contemporaries that takes many of these issues back into the fifteenth century. See her
Portal of the Skies: Topologies of the Divine in the Latin Motet (in progress). Moreover, Elizabeth
Randell Upton is developing methods for the critical interpretation of Dufay’s love songs.
7. See María Rosa Menocal, The Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 1994), and Robert M. Durling, Introduction to Petrarch’s
Lyric Poems, trans. and ed. Durling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).
als and/or communities in exile who yearn nostalgically for their homeland
in the guise of the Lady. But on the other hand, the musical settings that
comprise madrigal composition often articulate astonishingly modern in-

sights into subjectivity, for in the process of converting lyrics into the more
corporeal and time-oriented medium of music, they necessarily bring to bear
aspects of human experience and cultural assumptions not available to po-
etry. The historiographer Hayden White has pleaded with musicologists to
start paying back for what they have gleaned from historians and literary
scholars by oªering information not available except through music.
8
This
book serves as an installment of that payback.
It is, of course, notoriously di‹cult (I won’t accept the word dangerous—
dangerous to what? to whom?) to rely on nonverbal media for historical
data. Pitches and rhythms reside a long distance away from the apparently
solid semiosis of language. Yet if music is to figure as anything other than
a mere epiphenomenon (and those of us who lived through the music-
driven 1960s fervently believe as much), then we must find approaches that
will allow us to examine its meanings.
9
Otherwise, we will continue sim-
ply to graft music onto an already-formulated narrative of historical de-
velopments; more important, we will fail to learn what music might have
to teach us or to question seriously what may be incomplete accounts of
the past. At the very least I want in this book to shake loose a version of
early modern subjectivity too neatly packaged in recent studies and to en-
courage a process of historical revision that takes music as a point of de-
parture. I also wish to treat in depth a repertory too long neglected as a site
of crucial cultural work: the sixteenth-century Italian madrigal.
The madrigal scarcely qualifies as an obscure genre. Within its own time,
it occupied the center of musical production: the aesthetic debates con-
cerning sixteenth-century Italian music revolved around the experiments
the cultural work of the madrigal 7

8. Hayden White, “Form, Reference, and Ideology in Musical Discourse,” afterword to
Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992). My book Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2000) explicitly paid homage to White’s The Content
of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) in its title and project.
9. This slight diªerence in generation explains, I think, the diªerences in orientation be-
tween those “new musicologists” who search to discern meanings (e.g., Lawrence Kramer, Rose
Subotnik, and myself ) and those who adopt a more postmodernist approach in their work
(e.g., Carolyn Abbate and Mary Ann Smart).
performed by its principal composers,
10
and its success contributed greatly
to the viability of the new commercial enterprise of music printing.
11
More-
over, a large number of prominent musicologists have long concentrated
their eªorts to uncovering its history and making this music available to
modern musicians and audiences.
Why, then, this book? In point of fact, I have no new archival sources to
oªer nor hitherto-unknown composers to tout. Indeed, Modal Subjectivi-
ties deals only with the most familiar artists and madrigals of the tradition—
the ones most celebrated in their own day for their impact on cultural life,
the ones most readily available in textbooks, anthologies, and recordings.
And it concentrates far more on these musical texts than on the contexts
that surrounded their origins. I hope, however, to accomplish three major
goals, all of them similar to those pursued in my work on later periods.
First, I want to begin interpreting critically a major repertory that has re-
ceived mostly stylistic descriptions. By “interpreting critically” I mean in-
terrogating the formal details through which the selected compositions pro-
duce their eªects—structural, expressive, ideological, and cultural. A few

musicologists have previously undertaken projects that link sixteenth-cen-
tury musical procedures with the social: for instance, Joseph Kerman has
written extensively on English madrigals, especially those of William Byrd;
12
Anthony Newcomb’s work on the court of Ferrara strongly influenced my
own training and much of my subsequent work;
13
Gary Tomlinson and Eric
Chafe have examined in detail the music of Claudio Monteverdi;
14
Martha
introduction8
10. See the account of the tensions between Willaert and Rore in Martha Feldman, “Rore’s
‘selva selvaggia’: The Primo libroof 1542,” JAMS 42 (1989): 547–603; the flap surrounding Nicola
Vicentino’s enharmonic experiments in Henry Kaufmann, The Life and Works of Nicola Vi-
centino, Musicological Studies and Documents, vol. 11 (Rome, 1966); Galilei’s critique of the
polyphonic madrigal in his Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna (1581); and the Artusi/
Monteverdi controversy, discussed at length in my Chapter 8.
11. See Mary Lewis, Antonio Gardane, Venetian Music Printer, 1538–1569: A Descriptive
Biography and Historical Study, 1:1538–49 (New York, 1988); Suzanne Cusick, Valerio Dorico:
Music Printer in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1981); and Stanley Boorman,
“What Bibliography Can Do: Music Printing and the Early Madrigal,” Music & Letters 72.2
(May 1991): 236–58.
12. Joseph Kerman, The Elizabethan Madrigal (New York: American Musicological Soci-
ety, 1962).
13. Anthony Newcomb, The Madrigal at Ferrara, 1579–97 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980).
14. Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Ange-
les: University of California Press, 1987); Eric Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language (New York:
Schirmer, 1992).

Feldman in her book on the Venetian contexts of Adrian Willaert and Cipri-
ano de Rore brings into focus the kinds of questions I wish to pursue;
15
and,
of course, we all stand on the shoulders of Alfred Einstein, whose monu-
mental The Italian Madrigal, while no longer definitive in its details, is not
likely ever to find an equal in terms of sheer prodigious learning.
16
These
scholars and others will emerge as important figures in the chapters that fol-
low. But although it draws on the work of predecessors, this book will push
the enterprise of sixteenth-century music criticism to delineate rather diªer-
ent approaches to theory, analysis, and interpretation.
Second, I want to strengthen the intellectual connection between musi-
cology and scholars in the other humanities. Many of the issues raised over
the course of Modal Subjectivities bear traces of my engagement with writ-
ers such as Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt, Jonathan Dollimore,
María Rosa Menocal, Charles Taylor, and Peter Burke, all of whom pro-
ceed from the premise that human subjectivity has a history—a history for
which modern scholars may receive invaluable insights from the arts.
17
Most
New Historicists depend principally on literature, theater, and painting for
their evidence; they rarely refer to music as a resource (except in the work
of Theodor Adorno or Carl Schorske),
18
in large part because of the spe-
cialized training demanded by the task. They sometimes look to musi-
cologists for assistance, but music scholars have concerned themselves only
very recently with the questions typically asked by cultural historians. I

maintain that the madrigal can tell us all a great deal about constructions
of subjectivity—notions of the body, emotions, temporality, gender, rea-
son, interiority—during a crucial stage of Western cultural history. And if
some of these notions find direct corroboration in contemporaneous cul-
the cultural work of the madrigal 9
15. Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1995).
16. Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, trans. Knappe, Sessions, Strunk (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1949; repr., 1971).
17. Foucault, The Order of the Things;Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from
More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Jonathan Dollimore, Death,
Desire and Loss in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998); Menocal, The Shards of Love;
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989); Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
18. See, for example, Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York:
Vintage Books, 1981) and Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). For Adorno see Essays on Music, ed. Richard
Leppert (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).
tural discourses, others do not. Thus, although my work is indebted to Fou-
cault and others, I cannot subscribe in advance to any master narrative
against which to map my history of subjectivity, for doing so would fore-
close anything I might find in this radically diªerent medium.
Before proceeding further, I should explain why I treat musical texts—
here and elsewhere in my other work—as potential sources of historical
evidence, why I rely at least as heavily on what I discern in musical pro-
cedures as on verbal documents. I do not claim that we can read straight
through music to history: without question, many levels of cultural tropes,
artistic conventions, and social contingencies mediate between the dots on
the page and the complexities of a world now more than four centuries re-

moved. But the same holds true for verbal documents, which likewise re-
quire careful contexualization and which never can deliver anything ap-
proaching Truth. If we wait for the discovery of a treatise that will tell us
everything we want to know about this repertory, we will be able to ice-
skate in Hades while we read it. For the questions I ask of this repertory
often diªer from those posed by its composers and first audiences, all of
whom found themselves enmeshed in other cultural debates.
Yet I would not thereby concede that my enterprise qualifies as anachro-
nistic. Take for example the question of sexuality. Renaissance music theor-
ists generally did not discuss strategies for simulating desire, arousal, or cli-
max in their writings; they had (as it were) other fish to fry. Nevertheless,
the madrigal repertory deals consistently, obsessively, even graphically with
experiences of erotic engagement. I know in advance that those critics who
find problematic my ascription of sexual dimensions to Richard Strauss’s
Salome will also balk at this project. And I can also anticipate some who
will continue to worry about my hermeneutic incursion into the cultures
of historic Others. But if we are ever to move beyond the mere hoarding
of old music and enter into cultural interpretation, then we have to take
such chances. We must, of course, also take into account whatever docu-
ments do happen to survive. But for musicologists (and, if we can make
the case, for other cultural historians as well), these documents should also
include the music itself. The verbal does not trump the musical.
At issue here is a methodological problem concerning the relative weight
of texts and contexts. Music historians have tended to privilege what they
know (or think they know) about the historical terrain, then situate their
interpretations of music accordingly. But what if—as Jacques Attali quirk-
ily but astutely posits—music frequently registers epistemological changes
introduction10
before they are manifested in words?
19

What if John Cage (as Jean-François
Lyotard, among others, claims) sparked postmodernism as it appeared in
the other arts, decades before other musicians thought to write what they
themselves labeled as postmodernist music?
20
What if Mozart was (as E.T.A.
Hoªmann insisted) the first great Romantic—the model for the poets and
novelists who followed?
21
And what if the madrigalists anticipated Fou-
cault’s seventeenth-century episteme a good seventy years earlier, performed
the Cogito when Descartes wasn’t even a twinkle in his father’s eye? I firmly
believe that to demand verbal confirmation for anything we want to say
about music assumes that music can add nothing to our understanding of
a society that we cannot glean perfectly well from other kinds of sources.
And it can lead to grave underestimations of music’s impact on structures
of feeling in a culture.
22
I have a third purpose in writing this book. In recent years, most of my
eªorts have centered on music of the seventeenth century: a period that
witnessed the emergence of tonality, the musical system we still too often
regard as natural. As I began writing a chapter devoted to musical practices
before that change, I discovered that I could not do justice to its complex-
ity and vast range of possibilities in the course of a mere introduction, not
even in an introduction that threatened to stretch to inordinate length. That
chapter clearly needed to become a book in itself—a book necessary if my
account of style in the 1600s, Power and Desire in Seventeenth-Century Mu-
sic, were not to seem like yet one more celebration of tonality’s inevitable
emergence. I hope to demonstrate in Modal Subjectivities that there existed
no prima facie reason why musical grammar needed to have changed in the

1600s, that the syntactical and expressive sophistication manifested in the
sixteenth-century madrigal equals that of any subsequent musical reper-
tory. And, having done that, I can in relatively good conscience proceed to
an examination of the transformation, to ask why—given the extraordi-
the cultural work of the madrigal 11
19. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1985); afterword by Susan McClary.
20. Jean-François Lyotard, “Several Silences,” in his Driftworks, trans. Joseph Maier (New
York, 1984), 91–110.
21. E.T.A. Hoªmann, “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music” (1813), trans. Oliver Strunk, Source
Readings in Music History (New York: Norton, 1950; rev. ed., 1998).
22. I owe the expression “structures of feeling” to Raymond Williams. See his Marxism
and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35.
nary capabilities of this modus operandi —composers opted to alter dras-
tically not only their musical procedures but (more important) their fun-
damental conceptions of temporality and Selfhood.
23
Now an apology: I would like to be able to assure the interdisciplinary
reader that technical music-theoretical jargon will not enter into this text.
But my argument proceeds from my conviction that musical procedures
themselves constitute an indispensable aspect of the cultural content of any
repertory. Formal properties, in other words, operate neither as “purely mu-
sical” elements relevant only to music theorists nor as neutral devices on
top of which the content gets deposited, inasmuch as the stuª of music is
sound and time. And given the extensive grammatical mediation that reg-
ulates the relationships between sounds and their temporal arrangements,
we cannot hear straight through to the content.
Moreover, our contemporary ears—all long since oriented toward the
tonal strategies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—have to be re-
oriented to hear in significantly diªerent ways if they are to discern the mad-

rigal’s expressive and allegorical strategies. This process of rewiring will
doubtless prove di‹cult even for those who have learned to accept as uni-
versals the structural and harmonic norms of later musics. But as it turns
out (or does so according to the historical narrative I will weave over the
course of this book), the cultural agenda of the madrigal’s successive stages
cannot be disentangled from the successive developments of the highly in-
tricate musical system with which it was allied, which sustained and often
inspired its various moments, and which eventually served as the conven-
tional base that needed somehow to be repudiated and sacrificed to the cause
of radical individualism.
I will always attempt to translate the principal points I make into lan-
guage comprehensible to those without specialized musical training. Yet I
cannot avoid the formal frameworks within which these pieces unfold with-
out falling back on the assumption that their meanings all proceed directly
from the lyrics: an assumption that underlies most accounts of the madri-
gal, so prevalent that text/music relationships of virtually all varieties are
pejoratively termed “madrigalisms” or text-painting. It is as though com-
posers stumbled blindly from line to line, relying for coherence on their
chosen verses like children requiring training wheels on their bikes. At best,
introduction12
23. My Power and Desire in Seventeenth-Century Music is now in preparation for Prince-
ton University Press.